The ties that bound American families on the East Coast loosened for the loners who headed West. My brother the gambler explained it to me this way: “If we’d stayed in Boston, somebody would have a word with an uncle who’d talk to his brother the priest who’d tell a cop from the neighborhood in confidence. They’d work it out. In Los Angeles nobody knows you, and they break your legs right away.”
When Richard Avedon’s In The American West came out in 1985, some said it traded in stereotypes. He photographed small timers wheeling in their own worlds like planets. They pumped gas or stuck up the station, stood on their feet all day behind a counter or sat in front of a TV set, failing to respond when paged by their charges in the welfare nursing home.
Avedon:
She’s made of money from the petty cash drawer. What happens when this image is recast as embroidery?
Allison Manch: 
The act of sewing seeds a barren ground with domesticity. The figure is the same person in the same moment, but every inch of her has a achieved a homey acceptance. She’s now a name written in her grandmother’s Bible that no one ever crosses out.
Manch’s Gimme Shelter is at Grey Gallery through Feb. 6.
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